Williamson was concerned with similar, traditional subjects such as space travel, interplanetary colonisation and the effect space exploration and technology would have on the human psyche, which he believed to be frail and fallible. Many of his most popular works were distinctly dystopian, centred around troubled societies and distressed souls: they are cautionary tales regarding the potential of science to unleash the hubristic id from within.

Even by the standards of a genre renowned for its authors’ abundant turnover, Williamson was prolific: he had his first story printed in 1928 and his final novel published last year, at the age of 97. A writer’s writer who fired the imagination of generations of sci-fi novelists, he was also an inspiration to many scientists, exploring themes of genetic engineering, organ transplantation and anti-matter long before they became real-life concerns. He also coined the term terraforming, the concept of transforming an inhospitable planet or moon’s atmosphere into one resembling Earth’s.

John Stewart Williamson was born into a farming family in Arizona Territory in 1908, and grew up in New Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. It was a tough, impoverished upbringing, and the young Williamson was an introverted bookworm who sought refuge in the local library, where his consumption of scientific romances and their tales of flights to the stars provided comforting escapism.

In 1926 the Luxembourg-born writer on electronics, Hugo Gernsback, launched Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine dedicated explicitly to what he called “scientifiction” — stories of time travel, space travel and new inventions. Williamson, who was penniless, discovered the magazine later that year. “My life was saved when I discovered Gernsback’s Amazing Stories,” he later recalled. He sold his first story, The Metal Man, to the magazine in 1928, and with the help of the doctor and part-time sci-fi writer Miles J. Breuer, who tightened up his prose and helped to discipline his style, Williamson had his first novel Birth of a New Republic, concerning moon colonies rebelling against Earth authorities, published in 1930.

A novella, The Girl from Mars, had been published in 1929, and had been on a similar theme. It revolved around a race of super-intelligent humanoids who, having destroyed their own civilisation on Mars, return to Earth — with brutal repercussions. His subsequent Legion of Space anthologies featured capricious, omnipotent characters such as Giles Habibula. Although his work in the inter-war period is suggestive of concern about Man’s and society’s will to power, it was not wholly pessimistic. Prior to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Williamson and fellow writers were still cautiously hopeful about the positive potential of science.

Williamson was, nonetheless, principally concerned about the darker side of human nature, a projection perhaps of his own. He was given to periods of deep gloom, suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and in 1933 underwent psychoanalysis at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

By this time he had become established in his field, and delighted a promising teenager who had just published his first story: Williamson sent a postcard to a young Isaac Asimov reading “welcome to the ranks”.

By the 1940s Williamson was incorporating far more science into his fiction, subjects such as anti-matter and genetics, notably in his acclaimed novel Darker Than You Think (1948). The subject of in-vitro insemination was approached in The Girl from Mars; he is believed to be the first sci-fi writer to use the term “android” in its current sense; while, in the short story The Prince of Space (1931) he claimed that he (not, as is widely believed, Arthur C. Clarke) invented the concept of the rotating space habitat that simulates gravity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, he coined the word terraforming in a story published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942.

His work slowed down in the 1950s as he suffered from periodic writer’s block, and took an MA at Eastern New Mexico University, and he later took a doctorate in English literature at the University of Colorado. His thesis on H. G. Wells, which sought to challenge the perception of the writer as guileless optimist, was published in 1973. Other memorable works included the novellas The Moon Children (1972), Manseed (1982) and The Ultimate Earth (2000), which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. His last work, The Stonehenge Gate, was released in 2005.

His autobiography, Wonder’s Child, was published in 1984 and revised in 2005. He was married in 1947, but his wife, Blanche, died in a car accident in 1985, while he was at the wheel. A gentle, disarming character who found peace with himself in later years, Williamson is survived by a step-daughter.

Jack Williamson, writer, was born on April 29, 1908. He died on November 10, 2006, aged 98.